The number of products offered by vendors has historically ranged anywhere from just a few products to a complex array of goods and services spanning multiple product areas or categories. An example of a vendor that offers a complex array of goods and services is Sears Roebuck and company (Hoffman Estates, Ill.; hereinafter “Sears”). To assist the public in wading through the complex array of offered goods and services, vendors such as Sears have traditionally published paper-based price catalogs that list each of the products and services offered as well as their price and other relevant information.
When it was circulated, the Sears catalog provided information such as the price of a large number of household products including hardware, clothing, kitchenware, and jewelry. Although the Sears catalog is no longer circulated, paper-based price catalogs are still presently used by several vendors. For example, paper-based price catalogs are published on an annual basis by numerous chemical companies such as Merck, Aldrich, and Boehringer. However, paper-based price catalogs have a number of drawbacks that make them unsatisfactory for many types of applications. First, prices can only be updated each time the paper-based catalog is published. Often, because of printing and distribution costs, paper-based catalogs are only published on an annual basis. The infrequent distribution of price catalogs not only hampers product pricing, it hampers the introduction of new products and the process of discontinuing products as well. Second, paper-based price catalogs do not provide a satisfactory forum for listing or applying specific discounts, such as favored customer discounts, seasonal discounts, holiday discounts, or volume discounts. Third, distribution of paper-based price catalogs is expensive because the catalog has to be mailed or otherwise physically delivered to customers. To address these and other drawbacks, electronic pricing systems have been developed.
One electronic pricing system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,878,400 to Carter (hereinafter “Carter”). Carter discloses systems and methods used to determine the prices of products when the purchaser is a member of a purchasing group and the products are members of product groups. In Carter, purchasing groups are arranged into organizational groups. The organizational groups are arranged into a hierarchy (“organizational group hierarchy”) such that an organizational group below an immediately higher organizational group in the hierarchy is a subset of the immediately higher organizational group. Further, products are arranged into product groups. In Carter, the products groups are arranged in another hierarchy, called the “product group hierarchy,” such that a product group below an immediately higher product group in the product group hierarchy is a subset of the immediately higher product group. Each organizational group in the organizational group hierarchy and each product group in the product group hierarchy may be assigned a pricing adjustment.
A price quote for a particular product, in the methods disclosed by Carter, is determined by walking through the organizational group hierarchy until the node that reflects the purchaser in the transaction is found. Next, the product group hierarchy is scanned until the particular product is found in the product group hierarchy. A particular product may belong to a number of product groups. Then Carter works up the organizational group hierarchy and the product group hierarchy and identifies all of the organizational groups and product groups that are at higher levels than those selected by the user. All pricing adjustments from each of the organizational groups and product groups that are at higher levels in the organizational group hierarchy and product group hierarchy are collected, in addition to pricing adjustments for the particular product and the particular organizational group, and applied to the product in a given transaction.
Electronic pricing systems such as the one disclosed in Carter remedy many of the disadvantages found in paper-based price catalogs. Using electronic pricing systems, vendors may change prices on a frequent basis and complex discounting algorithms may be used. For instance, electronic pricing systems may be supported by a relational database management system that tracks a complex array of discounts and applies these discounts appropriately as requests for quotes are received. Electronic pricing systems can be used to make the price catalog electronically available on private networks or on public networks such as the Internet. In this manner, customers can readily access the electronic price catalog and vendors can update the catalog as frequently as desired. Furthermore, as described above, electronic pricing systems can be used to organize products and customers in a hierarchical fashion in order to simplify pricing look-up tables.
Although electronic pricing systems provide an enormous advance over paper-based price catalogs, electronic pricing systems, such as the one disclosed by Carter, are still unsatisfactory in practice. The price rules for products offered in electronic pricing systems must be manually adjusted each time the vendor wants to alter a price rule or alter the identity of the products to which the price rule applies. In this context, a price rule is any rule that includes a price rule operator that operates on one or more products or services.
To illustrate the disadvantages of known electronic pricing systems, consider the case in which a vendor identifies a group of products that the vendor wants to discount. The vendor may want to discount the group of products because there is an excessive number of the products in the inventory, the product is about to be discontinued, or the product has become a top selling item. To effectuate this discount, an account administrator must manually update the electronic pricing system to include a new price rule. That is, there is no mechanism within known electronic pricing systems to automatically introduce price rules on a dynamic basis. If the vendor is a company such as Amazon.com that sells books and discounts the top ten selling books at any given time by ten percent, the vendor must introduce a new price rule each time the identity of the top ten selling books changes.
Given the above background, what is needed in the art is improved electronic pricing systems. Such systems should not have the drawback of requiring manual adjustment of the electronic pricing system each time the vendor would like to alter the price rule terms for a class of products or services offered by the vendor.